After yesterday’s terrorist attack on London Bridge, I re-read this journal entry from November 16, 2015. I believe it speaks to the age we are in and wanted to share it with you.
The sun sets around 4:30 today. It seems that each year this catches me off guard – how quickly the daylight shrinks away, even before we get very deep into November.
The world was caught off guard this weekend, as Islamic terrorists launched a series of frightful attacks in Paris which left more than a hundred innocents dead. I’m waiting for our government to announce that they have arrested the video maker behind it all.
Goodness. I just watched a squirrel leap from the maple in the back of the yard to the birch near the garden. Very entertaining. Oh my, now a second one has done it. Squirrel terrorists assaulting the bird feeder in the birch. Will the birds launch a counter-assault? Or will the bird-president refuse to acknowledge that this is a threat that’s endemic to squirrels, that this is more a problem with bird-seed, or worse, that birds are to blame for inciting the squirrels to violence by not being nice enough to them. The birds ought to apologize for being able to fly and sing, while squirrels cannot.
Oh dear, now the neighbor’s cat just flew across the yard chasing one of the squirrels that was on the ground. He’ll have none of this nonsense about squirrels needing ‘safe spaces’. Oh the microaggressions!
Back to reality. I fear though, to be honest, that a generational battle is upon us, and will always be there running in the background of our lives, threatening to come front and center. In ordinary times, madness is held back, contained in a bottle, that only occasionally vents and shakes. But then comes the day when the cork blows off or the bottle shakes off the shelf and shatters, and there is no returning to normal then without years of focus and struggle. The madness must then play itself out.
Only when people say, ‘What’s in that bottle must never break free,’ can the threat be diminished. But when people and presidents say, ‘Bottle? What bottle?’ then clearly we will reap a fearful harvest.
The squirrels are coming.
